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It feels as if everyone who’s teaching a poetry class this semester is teaching Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. (I’m sure it’s being taught in nonfiction courses, as well; it’s been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in both poetry…

My friend Cecilia has a name for the type of art that is primarily tragic and yet ends well: the hard-won happy ending. Many of my favorite works start off with gut-wrenching situations that eventually give way to sweetness. In…

There are a lot of reasons I want to point writers and readers toward the video of Staking Our Claim: Trans Women’s Literature in the 21st Century. Hosted by the Barnard Center for Research on Women and sponsored in part…

About a thousand years ago, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, I took several classes with the poet Ronald Wallace. In one of the workshops, we discussed the poems of Ted Kooser. This was before Kooser…

“When spring came, when every crow announced its arrival by raising his cry half a tone…” – Sans Soleil Last week, deep into California’s wildflower season, I made a new rule: we’ll eat breakfast with the lights out so we can…